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Political Plunder — Again

If President Obama and Congress have their way with the
so-called health reform bill, the American people will have had
their pocketbooks and liberties plundered once again. The basic
purpose of government is to protect individuals and their property
and to ensure their liberties. However, Congress and most other
legislative bodies spend the bulk of their time doing just the
opposite. They take, primarily through taxation, from one group of
people what those people worked hard to produce and give it to some
other politically favored group. They pass a never-ending series of
regulations, which chip at our liberties until little is left.

Without the rule of law, property, economic opportunity and
liberty cannot be protected, so we have been taught to revere the
law. One hundred and sixty years ago, the brilliant French
political and economic theorist Frederic Bastiat warned us in his
classic, “The Law,” that the rule of law would be
perverted. As he noted, the law “has acted in direct opposition to
its proper end; it has destroyed its own object; it has been
employed in annihilating that justice which it ought to have
established, in effacing amongst Rights, that limit which was its
true mission to respect; it has placed the collective force in the
service of those who wish to traffic, without risk and without
scruple, in the persons, the liberty, and the property of others;
it has converted plunder into a right, that it may protect it, and
lawful defense into a crime, that it may punish it.”

No better description of the effects of the proposed health care
reform bill can be made than what Bastiat described. If it is
signed into law, the American people will lose part of their
self-defense against disease by not being allowed to go to those
who can best care for them, and they will be denied by the new
government regulations those procedures, devices and drugs that
would save lives, because they will not be developed. Despite
President Obama’s oft-repeated pledge not to increase taxes on
those making less than $200,000 a year, the bill is filled with tax
increases on precisely those who he said he would not tax. The
response from the administration and its congressional cheering
squad is to deny that a tax is a tax — George Orwell’s
“Animal Farm” is here.

The proposed plunder is hardly noticed by many because they have
come to believe that government plunder is proper and right because
it is so common. We have become used to politicians taking our
hard-earned assets and giving them to their favorite groups. Where
was the outrage when the centuries-old right of bondholders to be
at the head of the line in bankruptcy reorganization was given to
Mr. Obama’s friends in the labor unions in the Chrysler and General
Motors government takeovers? According to the Tax Foundation, the
average American works five months a year (to the end of May) to
pay his taxes to the government. To the extent that this taxation
provides little benefit or protection to the taxpayer because of
government waste, mismanagement or pure income redistribution, the
taxpayer is, in effect, being made into a tax slave.

There have been many articles recently about the fact that most
government workers make far more than their private-sector
counterparts. My colleague Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute has
calculated that when all of the employee benefits are properly
included, federal government employees, on average, receive more
than double their private-sector counterparts, who, unlike federal
workers, can be fired. Again, hardworking taxpayers are being
plundered to subsidize an overpaid federal work force.

Members of Congress tell us they are concerned about the lack of
jobs, yet their own jobs bill contains tax increases on
multinational corporations and others who wish to invest in
America, meaning less investment and fewer jobs. If they really
wanted to increase jobs, the solution would be simple: Cut the
taxes on employing labor and on productive work. But it is all
about power, not job creation or economic growth. When Congress
seizes your money, it claims to be creating jobs by giving it to
someone else who did not earn it. There is more honesty among those
in the Mafia, who at least do not try to claim they are stealing
from us for our own good.

Congress is not content just to plunder us. By running up
unsustainable deficits and debt, it is plundering our children and
grandchildren. All of those who are underage and cannot vote are
being taxed without representation.

Most people tacitly accept the political plunder — even
though intuitively they know it is wrong — because their own
representatives say they (through earmarks and subsidies) will
plunder others to give to them. It is a devil’s deal — with a
very bad end.